Will AI Replace Journalists?

In a world of rapidly growing technology, is it safe to assume our jobs as journalists are safe from technology?

In the rapidly growing field of Artificial Intelligence, it’s hard to determine exactly what AI is capable of, but we know it is capable of many complicated and advanced tasks.

Just recently we witnessed the AI human who got Saudi Arabian citizenship and who claimed to want to kill the human race in an interview.

Some routine or simple jobs are already being replaced by the new technology, easing up simple manual labor but also putting some white-collar workers at risk of layoffs.

When it comes to journalism, writers tend to think they are safe from the clutches of artificial intelligence, but that may not be the case in the future.

Recent progress in AI has seen the increase of natural language generation (Think Alexa, or Google Home) and this type of technology could eventually help artificial intelligence write hundreds of articles a day.

Unlike Alexa, Siri, and Google Home, this news based AI works together with humans to create articles based on data that is fed to it.

The Press Association project is known as RADAR – Reporters and Data and Robots – and relies on data sets from government, local authorities, and public services.

No news office can handle writing 250 localized, but this automation technology could handle it, and without taking any journalists job.

Human journalists are still very much needed in the still growing field and as journalism transitions to being mostly online based, humans are needed to make crucial decisions in the article writing process.

The hope for this technology, which is set to be available to other local UK news organizations, will mostly be used as a building block to creating local content.

Local journalism has taken a hit recently as online journalism becomes the standard, but without local journalism, who will keep local authorities responsible for their actions?

That is the idea behind this artificial technology, not to take jobs, it is meant to be a savior for local news organizations who have refused to adapt to technological change.